Well, the money is actually quite a bit lower than you think, and if you believe what you read (or read yourself), those who make less than $100,000 a year would be a few dozen people. I made $100,000 when I edited my first feature, in 2012. The industry is extremely lucrative, but it’s also very competitive because people have to pay to get in. But to understand the current landscape, you’ve got to figure out the differences between editors and those who make short films that are published on an indie label. Editors in the major industry are usually paid on a per-film basis – which means there are a lot of people in the industry that are earning a lot of money, but have no financial stake in the finished product.
Why? Because the studio is still trying to prove that their film should be seen more than once. The idea is to sell as many tickets in one screening of a film as possible. They’re trying to break up the “film club,” or film fan club, and have fewer films seen by a larger number of people. To them, a film that gets viewed a dozen times is really a finished product.
Let’s say you have a film that you’ve shown to 50 people, and you have a $50,000 budget. There’s a lot more people than that who watched the film in one screening, who made a $50,000 investment, and now want to rent the film in multiple theaters and see it once at $10, which will probably be a much bigger investment. On the other hand, you’ve also earned that much money, and have no stake in the finished product, and you could still make more money by having multiple screenings at that $10 price. So these two options – seeing the film and renting it (which doesn’t make financial sense either way) – are two very different decisions, with the film being rented and seen more often for less money.
But that isn’t the situation with independent filmmakers. They don’t have a financial stake in the final product they create. They can make a lot of money in one screening, but only if they sell the film to several theaters. If someone in an indie film makes $60,000 a year and has to rent the film out to 20,000 people (a $60,000 movie costs about $8,500), he could make a pretty penny. The money he made isn’t coming out of his pocket, but is coming from the pockets of
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